Monday, November 15, 2010

Math for Medical Professionals

It looks to me as though Andrew has been doing well at math. His test grades are great. But he doesn't feel as though he has an adequate grasp of it. We talked to the director of the nursing program at the local college about math. She confirmed what I suspected: it's far more important that he be very comfortable with the arithmetic and pre-algebra that is used extensively in nursing than it is that he graph functions, manipulate matrices, and compute with imaginary numbers.

So it's time to put away the College Algebra book and come up with a math program that better suits his goals.

I began to research what kinds of math we needed to focus on. Graphs. Statistics. Conversions. Metric. Ratios -- lots of ratios and percents. And so much more. As I began to cobble together resources from the library with the books sitting on our basement shelves, it finally crossed my mind that maybe I should sell this program after I put the work into developing it.

And then [light-bulb moment] I wondered if anyone had already created this math course. Some online sleuthing confirmed that someone had! Woo hoo!!!! The book arrived in only six days, and it looks perfect. There is only one thing on my list (understanding a 3-D reality from a series of 2-D pictures, such as in an MRI) that isn't covered in this book.

Flipping through the textbook I see a few topics that aren't explained clearly enough, or where a key point was left out. But if it's something that Andrew hasn't been exposed to elsewhere, I should be able to fill in the gap. The answer key is online, not in the back of the book. That's a little inconvenient; I had to fork over my name and address and all that jazz to create an account where I could access the answer key. I suppose I could have just graded the homework assignments myself. But I didn't want to. :-)

So anyway, I am hyped to have discovered this book that will save me many hours. It will allow Andrew to plug away at teaching himself instead of having to wait on me while I'm making supper instead of developing new lessons. Hooray!